by Tim Severin
She had leaned up and kissed him. ‘Yesterday I happened to meet Anne-Marie Kergonan on the foreshore. She told me that you had been discussing the charter with her. She was very friendly. She told me that morvaut is the Breton word for a cormorant. Hector, take it as an omen – it’s a greedy bird but one that gorges on its catch.’
Hector was wakened from his reverie by a slight lurch. The skiff had reached Dan’s marker buoy and Jezreel was unshipping his oars. The big man picked up the kedge anchor lying on the bottom boards. ‘Ready?’ he asked. Hector checked that the coil of anchor line was free and nodded.
Jezreel dropped the anchor overboard, and the last few fathoms of cable ran out with a thrumming sound. As soon as the anchor had settled on the seabed, the big man waved to the pinnace. The Kergonan brothers, helped by Jacques, began taking in the slack. The Morvaut was too small to carry a windlass so they were hauling by hand. The pinnace slowly began to take up position over the spoil ground.
*
WITHIN AN HOUR they knew they had struck lucky. Dan came across a pile of more than a hundred pieces of eight on the sea floor where a canvas bag had rotted and burst. In the next three dives he brought up a rich haul of tableware – jugs, spoons, bowls, forks and goblets, all in massive silver.
‘I wonder if any of the galleon’s crew survived the wreck?’ Hector asked Roparzh Kergonan. He was on the pinnace’s deck, trying to divide the spoil into two equal piles, one for the Bretons, and one for himself and his friends. Roparzh was hovering over him, making sure that Hector was not cheating. Hector could smell the rum on the man’s breath.
‘Someone usually lives,’ grunted Roparzh. ‘Clings to flotsam and is washed ashore or gets clear in a ship’s boat.’
Hector turned his attention to a large silver dish. Dan had found it wedged in a crevice in the coral. The dish was engraved with an ornate coat of arms, and Hector guessed that it had been the property of an officer on the galleon, someone from a noble family.
‘How do we divide this item fairly?’ he asked the Breton.
‘Hack it up with an axe and weigh out the scraps,’ came the blunt reply.
Hector winced inwardly at the thought. ‘It is a match with the other pieces. They’ll be worth more as a set.’
‘And the first person we try to fence it to will recognize the mark and guess how we got our hands on it. Might even know the family.’
‘Only if that person is familiar with the crests and emblems of Spanish families.’
Roparzh was looking at him as if he was simple-minded.
‘You mean the Spaniards buy goods stolen out of their own wrecks?’ Hector said.
‘There’s more goes on than either Madrid or London knows about.’
The Breton decided that he had said enough. He shovelled up his share of the coins and put them in a pouch. Without asking, he took the silver dish out of Hector’s hand and slouched away with it. Hector decided that it was not worth making an issue of the matter and went to help Dan as he climbed out of the water.
The Miskito was exhausted. He flopped down on the deck and leaned back against the bulwarks to rest. His eyes were closed, and the water ran off his body, making dark patterns across the deck. He looked utterly spent. After a minute or two, he opened his eyes. They were red-rimmed from the time spent underwater.
‘We have to watch our backs now,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ Hector asked.
Dan’s eyes flicked to the stern where the Kergonan brothers were huddled together. They were double-checking their haul of coins and silverware. ‘One dark night when we are asleep, they may take the chance to be rid of us.’
He lifted one hand and made a cutting motion across his throat.
TWO
THE DISCOVERY OF THE candelabrum was the start of their reward. In the next five days of diving on the wreck Dan brought up nearly two hundred more coins. They were mostly cobs, misshaped slugs of metal that scarcely looked like money. Yet each one bore an assayer’s monogram that proved it was genuine silver. He also retrieved twenty-three gold doubloons and an assortment of tableware and jewellery – pendants, bracelets and necklaces. Under the mistrustful gaze of the Kergonans everything was sorted and divided. As the value of the haul increased, so too did the tension on board. It boiled over on the afternoon Dan brought up a leather purse from the sea floor. Jacques slit open the soggy purse and tipped a dozen emeralds out on to the deck. A drunken Roparzh Kergonan gave a great whoop of triumph and reached forward to grab the spoil. But Jacques beat him to it. The Frenchman quietly picked up one of the jewels and held it up to the sunlight. He had worked with a Paris fence and knew how to spot a fake. Without hesitation he declared that the ‘emeralds’ were nothing more than chunks of coloured glass. It was as if he had blatantly swindled the Breton. Roparzh leaped on him and seized him by the throat and would have strangled him if Jezreel had not intervened.
That night was Hector’s turn to be on anchor watch. Seated on the foredeck in the pre-dawn darkness, he knew that the salvage operation had to end very soon. Even if the Kergonans could be kept under control, less than half a barrel of drinking water remained. With no fresh water on the two nearby islands, they would soon be forced to leave the wreck site and head for home. As he was idly speculating how much his share of the salvage would be worth, he became aware of someone creeping stealthily towards him. He was about to call out a challenge when a low voice said, ‘I thought I’d join you.’ A moment later Anne-Marie Kergonan sat down beside him. ‘It’s too hot to sleep,’ she said, looking along the length of the silent ship.
In the faint starlight Hector could make out that she was wearing a loose nightgown of some pale material and that it had slipped to one side, so the shoulder nearest to him was bare. There was a waft of some sort of musky scent from the perfume she was wearing.
‘What are you going to do with your share of the findings?’ she asked after a long pause.
Hector kept his voice as neutral as possible. ‘I’ve no idea. Depends on how much there is.’
She turned her face towards him, and he was conscious of the shape of the soft mouth, the lips parted. Her hand reached up and caught back a strand of hair that hung loose. The movement was smooth, seductive. ‘No idea at all?’
He didn’t know how to answer, and she went on. ‘I met that new wife of yours in Tortuga. She’s very attractive. I’m sure you miss her.’
‘Maria is a remarkable woman.’ His reply was cautious.
Anne-Marie gave a throaty chuckle. ‘And an understanding one, I would guess. Most women are when they want to keep their man.’
She shifted position, a slight movement that brought her thigh a fraction closer to him. Perhaps it was his imagination but he felt soft warmth radiating from her. ‘How old are you, Hector?’ she asked.
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘And how many women have you known?’
He was flustered, stumbling in his reply. ‘A few.’
‘Well before I was your age,’ she said, ‘I had learned to seize the opportunities that came my way. It had become clear to me that life passes by those who hesitate, and I resolved to conduct my life as I wanted, follow my instincts, and not behave as others would tell me or expect of me.’
‘Is that why on Tortuga they call you “the Tigress”?’ he said boldly.
A soft laugh. ‘Some people find me to be fierce. Others say that I am wilful. I see it as pride in what I am and what I can do.’
The light was strengthening. The sea around them was changing from inky black to a very faint sheen of dark blue. He noticed that she was watching him closely, her eyes in shadow.
She gave a slow, deliberate smile. He read both triumph and invitation. ‘Unless you take the chances that life offers, you do not taste what it is to live fully.’
She leaned towards him and stroked him gently on the bare forearm. He gave an involuntary shiver.
‘Not now, and not here,’ she said, glancing meaningfully t
owards the stern. Hector could make out the shape of her oldest brother, asleep on deck beside the binnacle.
She stood up, smoothing down the loose gown and hitching it up over the naked shoulder. Despite himself, he felt a surge of desire. He wanted to rise to his feet and put his arms around her, and press her ripe body close to him. But she bent down and laid a finger on his lips. ‘Perhaps when it is more convenient,’ she said quietly. A moment later she was gone, gliding along the deck in her bare feet, and ducking in through the low door of the aft cabin.
Hector sat very still. He was uncomfortably aware that from now on he would find it difficult to expunge Anne-Marie Kergonan from his mind.
It was at that moment, with his mind in confusion, that he looked up and saw, very faintly, a tiny speck of white on the distant horizon.
*
JUAN GARCIA FONSECA moved about the deck of his urca, San Gil, with a dragging limp. Each time he stepped out with his right foot, he had then to swivel his lower body, heave, and lift his left foot forward. He had been sailing the triangle between Cartagena, Porto Bello and Havana nearly all his life, and in that time he had been shipwrecked four times and fought off countless attacks from English and Dutch pirates. Once he had nearly lost his ship to a gang of African slaves who had got free of their chains below deck. Firing a swivel gun down the hatchway had restored order, at the cost of one member of his own crew whom they had taken hostage. With such an eventful career behind him, it was natural that most observers imagined his pronounced limp was the result of an injury during one of his many near-escapes from disaster. Only those who had known Juan Garcia since his early childhood in Cartagena knew that his infirmity was in fact an accident of birth. He had been born with a twisted hip. When he reached his teens, he had come to the conclusion that strong arms and a good grip aboard ship would make up for awkward legs on land, and had persuaded his father, a bookish civil servant, to let him go to sea. He had prospered, saved up enough money to buy his own vessel, and shown the shipwrights where to fit plenty of handholds within his easy reach. Now, forty years later, he accepted that his urca was outdated in design, notoriously slow through the water and handled like a pig against the wind. But her broad, old-fashioned hull still provided plenty of cargo space and made her very stable. He had named her after the patron saint of cripples, and he had no intention of replacing the San Gil.
Juan Garcia was standing with his son Felipe, watching the swells heap up on the edge of the reef as the urca skirted southward along the Vipers. ‘If you read the signs, you have plenty of warning,’ Juan Garcia was saying. He never lost a chance to pass on his knowledge. One day, perhaps in a couple of years, Felipe would be taking over as captain.
‘There.’ Juan Garcia pointed to where a sudden smear of white foam showed the presence of a coral head. ‘If the swell comes from a direction different from the wind and is much bigger than usual, that tells you a hurricane is lurking out to the east.’
He paused and watched the humped back of a swimming turtle appear briefly above the waves. The creature raised its head and gazed briefly at the ship, the bright eyes and hooked beak like a predatory bird. Then its flippers moved gently and it sank from view.
‘And if the air becomes hot and heavy and the shirt sticks to your back even though the weather is fine and clear, be on your guard.’
Felipe Fonseca had heard his father’s hurricane lecture many times. To provoke him he murmured, ‘Are you not worried that the stars were twinkling so brightly last night?’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ his father demanded, falling into the trap.
‘A sailor in Havana told me that the Philippines people believe that when the stars twinkle very brightly, it means a storm is coming.’
‘Why should they think that?’
‘They claim that there’s a great wind far, far up in the sky. When it blows really strongly, it makes the stars flicker. Then, because it can’t extinguish the stars, the wind loses its temper. It swoops down on the earth as a gale.’
‘Pure superstition,’ grunted his father. He was feeling guilty that he had lied to his son. He had told him that he would risk the Vipers so early in the season because it was Felipe’s duty to be back in Cartagena when his son’s young wife gave birth. But the true reason for haste was that Juan Garcia himself was anxious. A clumsy midwife had caused his own affliction, and he dreaded that his first grandchild would suffer the same mishap. He wanted to be at home to make sure that the midwife was the best that he could hire.
Putting the thought out of his mind, he returned to Felipe’s seafaring education. ‘If you are caught in a hurricane, never run directly before the wind. If you do, you’ll be swamped or capsize. Instead, watch the way the wind shifts. If it backs, make sail on the starboard tack and run on a broad reach until the wind heads you. Then heave to.’
He was about to go on to say that if the wind veered, the mariner should sail as fast as possible on the same starboard tack but close-hauled. This would offer the best chance of avoiding the eye of the approaching storm. But he was interrupted.
‘Father, there’s a small boat on the Vipers, fine on the starboard bow.’
Juan Garcia stared where his son pointed. His eyes were not as sharp as they used to be. It was a sign of advancing age. Perhaps he should think about turning the San Gil over to Felipe sooner.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Looks like a small pinnace. Right on the reef.’
Juan Garcia shrugged. ‘Could be anyone. We’ll pass on by.’
Twenty minutes later they heard very faintly the sound of a cannon shot.
‘They’ve fired a windward gun,’ said Felipe.
‘Bring her up two points, no more!’ his father told the helmsman, who was looking at him enquiringly. A windward gun was the recognized signal that a boat wished to communicate. The unknown pinnace was too small to be a threat, but experience told him to be very wary.
‘I can’t see any sort of flag,’ Felipe said after a while. The pinnace was close enough to make out some figures on deck. There was something untidy about her rig, the mast slightly at a slant, as if she had run aground on the coral.
More time passed, and then Felipe announced, ‘There’s a boat putting off. They’re rowing out to try to intercept us.’
‘We maintain course,’ his father growled.
Felipe let out a low whistle of surprise. ‘There’s a woman in the skiff. She’s standing in the bows and waving.’
Juan Garcia caught the look of astonishment on the face of his helmsman. The man was bending his knees as he tried to peep under the mainsail and get a good look forward at the approaching boat.
‘All right then, bring her up to wind,’ he ordered reluctantly. He had a crew of six, without counting himself and Felipe. They were more than enough to beat off any attack from a skiff. ‘Bring a couple of blunderbusses up from my cabin and make sure the primings are dry.’
*
ABOARD THE MORVAUT there had been angry words. Scarcely had Hector warned there was a ship on the horizon than the Kergovan brothers were on their feet. Roparzh and Yacut ran to the anchor cable and began to haul in the slack. Yannick hastily cleared the halyards, ready to hoist sail and flee. But a few minutes later their sister emerged from the cabin, took one look at the distant sail and yelled angrily at them. She was shouting in Breton so Hector could only guess that she was cursing them. She looked formidable. Her skin was flushed with anger, and for a moment Hector thought she was about to walk over to Yannick and slap him across the face.
Jacques and Jezreel were also poised, ready to help retrieve the anchor. She switched to English, ordering them to stop. ‘We wait until we know who they are. They could be French or English.’
‘They’re Spanish, that’s for sure. No one else in these waters,’ retorted Jacques.
Anne-Marie rounded on him. ‘Use your head. If that boat is indeed a Spanish cruiser, I doubt we can outrun her.’ She turned to face Hector.
‘I suppose so,’ said Hector dubiously. He was astonished to see the change from the flirtatious woman who had sat beside him less than two hours earlier.
‘Good. But that’s only if things go wrong.’ She rounded on her brothers and reverted to Breton, loosing a stream of orders. Roparzh and Yacut stopped hauling on the anchor line. Yannick, looking surly, went to slack off the shrouds so that the mast leaned out badly off true.
‘What’s all that about?’ asked Jacques, cocking an eye at the drunken angle of the spar.
‘To make it look as though the Morvaut has run aground,’ Hector suggested.
‘That won’t deceive anyone,’ Jacques muttered under his breath.
Hector could see that Anne-Marie was trying to draw the foreign ship closer, but he did not understand why.
‘Wouldn’t it be better to let them sail on past?’ he asked her.
‘And miss the chance to continue fishing the wreck!’ she replied sharply. Eyes narrowed, she was watching the urca. ‘She’s altering course to come a little more towards us. Definitely a Spaniard, a merchantman. Roparzh, get the skiff ready. You and Yannick come with me. I’m going to talk with that vessel.’
She turned to Hector. ‘How good’s your Spanish?’
‘My mother came from Galicia.’
‘I want you to interpret. We’re going to get ourselves some water and food.’
Hector hesitated. There was something about Anne-Marie’s belligerent confidence that made him uneasy.
‘The Morvaut is chartered to fish for wrecks, not for piracy,’ he warned.
She tossed her head dismissively. ‘We’ll pay the Spaniards for what we need. But they’ll only deal with us if they think we have permission from their authorities to be here.’
She snapped an order at Roparzh, who shambled off and returned with a handful of silver coins that she tucked into a pocket of her loose breeches.
